by Ann Hood
A pale, wild-eyed Susannah burst in as soon as Maya opened the door. She’d had this happen before. Women, about to get the baby they have yearned for, fall apart. How many hours had Maya sat in hotel room across China listening to a mother-to-be’s fears and anxieties about the baby she was about to hold. Once, it happened right in the corridor as the group walked to the room where their babies waited for them. Maya had to keep everyone there in the hallway for over an hour while she calmed the woman, the babies’ restless crying growing louder and louder in the overheated building.
“You have to tell me now,” Susannah said. She was thin in her funny pink pajamas decorated with poodles, and trembling. “What’s wrong with this baby?”
Maya filled the electric kettle with water and set about making tea for them. She measured the loose tea leaves into the spoon-shaped silver holders and placed them in the small teacups. In no time, the kettle whistled, and Maya was handing a steaming cup of tea to Susannah, who had dropped into one of the gold wingback chairs. She had dark rings of smudged mascara beneath her eyes.
“Is it the same kind of thing? Is she like Clara?” Susannah asked. She held the teacup in both hands but did not drink from it.
“Susannah,” Maya said, sipping the floral-tasting tea, “Blossom is fine. She is healthy. She loves music and she smiles whenever she hears it.”
“The guide, that Elvis, he said there was no problem,” Susannah said.
Fear had no logic. Maya understood this. In the ambulance that raced her and her baby to the hospital in Honolulu, she had thought that if she could just hold her daughter, she could save her life. She had believed that if she promised God things—to give up her work, to feed the poor, to go to church—Maile would live. None of it made sense. Her daughter died from head injuries sustained in a fall from her arms, and no amount of bargains or mother’s love could change that.
Maya said, “This baby is fine. And you will love her and be a wonderful mother to her. I know this, Susannah.”
When Susannah cried, relief washed over her like the sun coming out.
After she left, still tearful but ready now for what lay ahead, Maya opened the heavy draperies and watched as the sun struggled to break through the haze of pollution and clouds that hung over the city.
In five hours, a woman would call Maya’s name and when Maya stepped forward, a baby would be put into her arms. Her own fear rose inside her now. How tightly could she hold a baby in her arms? She did not doubt that she would love her daughter. Maya knew the enormous love a mother felt. But she worried now, watching the city below her come to life, that knowing what children could do to your heart, how could she hold another one? Brave friend, Emily had called her. Maya did not feel brave this morning. Instead, like Susannah—perhaps like each of the women waiting in these hotel rooms—she feared falling in love again.
THE FAMILIES FILLED the empty cribs with soft hand-knit blankets brought from home, and stuffed dogs and bunnies and pigs. They dared to unpack the baby clothes they had so lovingly chosen back when this day seemed impossibly far away, and to place them neatly in a dresser drawer. They placed baby powder and diaper rash cream and No More Tears shampoo on the bathroom counter, and put soft sponges shaped like ducks and monogrammed pink towels beside them. They lined up copies of Goodnight Moon and I Love You Like Crazy Cakes on the bureau, and lay out toys: toys that played Mozart and toys with wheels and toys that had Big Bird pop out from them. The families prepared the hotel rooms for their babies. Then they prepared themselves. Dressed in their Sunday best, they triple-checked their video camera batteries and their diaper bags. They primped and they checked and they straightened until there was nothing left to do but leave this room and get in the elevator and go to the lobby where the others would be waiting. They would all get on the bus and take their usual seats and drive through these clogged streets into their future.
In her dual role of mother-to-be and head of the Red Thread Adoption Agency, Maya did all of these things and also packed her briefcase with the paperwork for the head of the orphanage and the papers each person would sign when they accepted their baby. If she focused on that role, Maya thought, perhaps she would not shake so much. Perhaps she would gain confidence. Perhaps this would really go well.
The bus was unusually silent. The air was filled with the constant smell of exhaust that permeated the air here and a mix of everyone’s perfumes.
“Fifteen-minute ride,” Elvis said from his perch at the front of the bus. His pompadour gleamed blue-black. “Then inside city hall to waiting room. Then”—he paused, grinning a wide grin—“then into room where babies are waiting for mommies and daddies.”
To Maya, it seemed the entire bus held its breath. She forced herself to breathe.
In front of her, she saw the tops of Nell and Benjamin’s heads, bent toward each other.
Benjamin had called Maya the day the referrals came. He was scheduled to leave for Sardinia to sail that very next weekend. “She’s healthy, right?” he’d asked Maya. “And adorable?” When she told him yes, she was healthy and adorable, Maya added, “And she’s yours.”
“And I thought I wanted to sail around the world,” he’d said.
Now, Maya heard him say in a calm, soothing voice, “Remember on our first date, all we could talk about was The Great Gatsby? Remember how much we love that book? And we said that very night in the unlikely event that we ended up married we would name our first baby after one of the characters in it?”
“Tell me again,” Nell said in a low voice.
“You wore a black cashmere coat. And red lipstick. We went to Casa Romero in Boston and you ate all of my pork. We drank too many margaritas and talked about The Great Gatsby. The entire evening, all I could think about was how I could convince you to go out with me again.”
“Not true,” Nell said, laughing softly.
“Don’t be afraid,” Benjamin said.
Maya felt all of their fear, though. It rose up from them and mixed with the exhaust and perfume. She had had a baby before, and what she felt now—what they all felt—was no different from the way she felt as she and Adam raced to the hospital to have their baby. Then, as now, fear and love and hope overtook everything else. Until the moment they handed her daughter to her nine hours later. In that moment, everything settled into one thing: a mother’s love. There was nothing like it. Nothing. It was made up of all the other emotions, fear and dread and anxiety and hope and joy and faith. Maya wondered if it would be the same when this baby was handed to her. Could she feel it twice? Could she love this baby, this stranger?
The bus pulled in front of a nondescript cinderblock building.
“Let’s go, mommies and daddies,” Elvis said.
With the pneumatic opening of the door, the atmosphere changed and everyone turned from somber to giddy. In that building, their babies were waiting for them. They rushed from the bus, following Elvis’s shiny blue jacket into city hall, up a flight of stairs, and into the waiting room.
Emily and Michael each hooked an arm into Maya’s and walked with her.
“Our daughters are going to be friends forever,” Emily said.
Michael said, “Think of it, Maya. Slumber parties and tea parties and visits to Santa. Beatrice and Honor side by side.”
If her friends were not moving her forward, Maya did not think she would keep going. Because being here with the expectant faces of these people around her and the distant sound of babies crying, Maya realized that she could not do it. She could not risk loving another baby. She could not fall from that great height again.
Emily was spinning a future now in which their daughters became best friends and Maya and Emily grew old together. She was talking about first steps, losing baby teeth, learning to ride bikes. Maya’s steps slowed, but Emily and Michael urged her into that room.
She watched Sophie and Theo giggling together and Benjamin taking a video of everyone waiting there and Nell applying lipstick and Carter videotaping Benj
amin videotaping.
“I can’t,” Maya said. She thought she said it out loud, but no one heard her. Emily did not let go of her arm.
The door swung open and Elvis grinned his wide grin and said, “Your babies are ready for you.” He stepped aside so that the parents could rush out.
“I can’t do this,” Maya said.
Someone else took her arm and looked her right in the eye.
“We can do it,” Susannah said. “Come with me. We’ll go in there together. And we will hold our daughters and we will love them fiercely.”
Somehow Maya’s feet moved, one in front of the other, down that long corridor, Susannah’s hand firmly in her own.
Somehow she walked into the conference room where the aunties—the caretakers from the orphanage—stood erect, each with a baby in her arms.
The orphanage director stood in the middle of the room with a clipboard in her hands. Her face had too much powder on it. There was a smudge of lipstick on her front tooth.
Without any opening remarks, she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Walker-Adams.”
Confused, Nell and Benjamin stepped forward. Carter videotaped their every move as one of the aunties handed them their baby.
QUICKLY, EACH NAME was called, and each couple stepped forward. The babies were dressed in double pairs of threadbare footie pajamas. They looked surprised as the auntie put first Jordan, then Blossom and Ella and Beatrice safely in their mothers’ arms.
Then she heard her own name called. “Maya Lange.”
“I can’t,” she said.
Emily and Susannah and Sophie and even Nell surrounded her, their babies already settled into their arms.
Maya opened her arms.
An auntie nodded at her. She stepped toward Maya. She held a baby in purple pajamas. The auntie placed that baby in Maya’s arms, then stepped away.
Maya held her breath. She looked into her daughter’s eyes. Her daughter looked back.
A calm came over Maya, the same feeling she’d had when they’d handed Maile to her nine years earlier in Honolulu.
“Hello daughter,” she whispered.
EPILOGUE
On the flight home ten days later, the families moved up and down the aisles of the 747, comparing their babies. Which one cried too much at night. Which one liked to eat shrimp. Which one had already started to stand up. These were their children, and they were proud and proprietary.
In the airport that morning, Maya had paused to say a silent thank-you to the brave women who had dared to leave their daughters in the hope that there would be a life for them somewhere, that they would be loved and nurtured. For Maya in particular, as a mother who had lost a child, she could not begin to express what she felt for the woman she would never know who had lost a daughter too. But through that loss, Maya was finding herself again.
Maya stood among the beaming new parents and their daughters and said, “These mothers gave us a gift, but they will never know how grateful we are.”
“I hope they know,” Emily said. “I hope that somewhere deep inside them they do know what they’ve done for us.”
Now, Maya sat with her daughter on her lap, and watched the families. All of them, happy.
What she could not see were the families they were leaving behind as China disappeared and the ocean stretched before them. The woman, already pregnant again, staring out a window and wondering where the daughters she’d abandoned were now. Were they safe? she wondered. Were they loved? While Emily rubbed the baby’s nose against her own and the baby laughed, a new baby rolled and kicked in its mother’s belly. I am here, Mother, it seemed to be saying. Do not look back. Only look forward. Still, every day of her life, she did look back, and worried over her lost daughters.
Or the young girl, her daughter nestled here on Nell’s lap, walking down a dusty road with two sweet potatoes in her basket, staring into an empty field hoping for a glimpse of a young man who had gone to Beijing without her.
Or the mother playing with her daughter, laughing with her, even as she ached for the girl’s twin sister. That baby had been weak and small, but in Susannah’s arms she looked healthy, her cheeks rosy, her eyes bright. The woman wondered: Did she survive? Somewhere deep inside her did she also ache for her sister and her mother who had loved her?
Or the mother who went every Saturday into Loudi, and walked the streets of the city and the pathways of the park, clutching a photograph of the daughter who was snatched from her but today slept so soundly in Theo’s arms. Have you seen a baby who looks like this? she asked people she passed and store clerks and street cleaners. They all shrugged and looked away. A beautiful baby, she told them. A happy baby. My baby.
And Maya could not see the grief-stricken man at his desk in his office at the university, crying for his dead wife and the daughter he had left at the orphanage doorstep. Crying even as he prayed that his daughter had somehow found her way to America, when at this moment, pressed close to Maya, that daughter was indeed on her way to America.
The plane reached 40,000 feet, high above the clouds. The babies grew sleepy. Maya held her sleeping daughter across her lap. Before she left the White Swan Hotel in Guanzhou this morning, Maya had called Jack. “I understand if you don’t want to see me again,” she told him. “But Honor and I land at Logan tomorrow night at ten o’clock. I would like you to be there.” Unbelievably, Jack had said, “I will be there.”
The sun shimmered outside the plane, sending bright light through the windows. In that light, Maya almost saw it, that red thread, tangled and curved, connecting each baby to their mother. She blinked. The red thread glimmered and then slowly disappeared. No matter how knotted or tangled it became, at the end of it was the child you were meant to have.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In 2005, three years after our daughter Grace died, my husband Lorne, our son Sam, and I traveled to Changsha, China, in Hunan Province, to bring home our baby girl, Annabelle. I have many people to thank for helping us on our journey, but first and foremost are Lorne and Sam. Also, my mother Gloria Hood, Aunt June, Aunt Dora and Uncle Chuck, my niece Melissa Hood, my mother-in-law Lorraine Adrain, and my cousins Gina Caycedo and Gloria-Jean Masciarotte, who, in many ways, traveled this path with us. Our adoption was made possible through China Adoption with Love in Brookline, Massachusetts, and I have endless gratitude to its director, Lillian, and our social worker there, Stephanie. Thanks too to Sharon Ingendahl, Amy Green, Mary Sloane, Coral Bourgeois, the Thachers (Sarah, Andrew, and Olivia), Ned and Polly Handy, Helen Schulman, Tracey Minkin, Frances Carpenter, Lisa Van Allsburg, Nancy Compton, and Lisa Van Adlesburg, who all helped us in some way to get to China and welcomed our family home. The comfort given to us by Matt Davies, Faith Pine, and Dan Moseley is appreciated and never forgotten.
The adoption stories in this novel are a work of fiction, all given birth in my imagination. For background about China and its abandoned daughters I read The Lost Daughters of China by Karin Evans and Wanting a Daughter, Needing a Son by Kay Ann Johnson. In China, we traveled with ten families who also brought home daughters, and I wish to thank them for sharing this time in their life with us. A special thank-you to the Sitrins—Steven, Laura, and Shira—who continue to celebrate with us. Kerrie Hoban and Mary Hector helped me by giving me the space in which to write this book. As always, a thank-you to my extraordinary agent, Gail Hochman, and my wise and generous editor, Jill Bialosky. And to Erin Lovett, Marianne Merola, Joanne Brownstein, Maya Zin, Jody Klein, and Adrienne Davich, who all work tirelessly in my behalf. Finally, in memory of my daughter, Grace. Always.
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